What To Do With Highly Radioactive Waste

March 23, 1992

In just six years, the federal government is supposed to open a permanent storage facility for high-level nuclear wastes. The deadline won't be met, however. In fact, a permanent repository may never be built. Yet not finding a safe way to dispose of contaminated waste permanently could be the death blow to the nuclear-power industry.

In the interim, highly radioactive spent fuel rods are stored at nuclear-power plants, including the four in Connecticut. But the submerged racks of these blue-glowing uranium fuel assemblies are begining to overcrowd their storage pools.

Permanent disposal is technically straight-forward. The leftovers from nuclear-fission reactions can be made into radioactive glass bricks and piled safely in a geologically stable underground vault, nuclear-industry experts claim.

The federal Department of Energy reports that a repository won't be ready until at least 2010. The leading candidate for a site has been Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Another feasible location would be the already radioactive tunnels at the unneeded Nevada nuclear-weapons test site. Yet public opposition to building permanent disposal facilities anywhere is overwhelming.

If the accumulation of nuclear wastes since Enrico Fermi's initial chain reaction in 1942 could be disposed of safely and permanently, the nuclear-power industry might have a future.

A new generation of smaller, safe, cost-effective nuclear-fission power plants is apparently on the drawing boards. Included, report nuclear-power advocates, are plants that will produce almost no radioactive waste. Yet critics counter that the new designs are as dangerous as the existing plants. Moreover, the critics claim, plans to reduce or eliminate waste through recycling of nuclear fuel will not work.

Still well in the future is the possibility of taming nuclear fusion, the energy source of the sun and stars. Fusion, using hydrogen as its fuel, creates energy by joining atomic nuclei instead of splitting them apart. Although British researchers have recently demonstrated sustained fusion in the laboratory, fusion-power plants are decades away.

New England is more dependent on nuclear power than the rest of the country. It's unlikely that only conservation or alternative

sources of power can meet our needs any time soon. But fission plants will eventually choke on their own wastes unless a permanent national disposal program is readied